(Targets are Bait)

Up to this point you have good tenants, working people, retired and unemployed, and nobody is any trouble. One day a new tenant moves in and you are approached by someone who represents themself as police or some branch of the security services. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t, but the next thing they tell you IS a lie. That the new tenant, usually a woman or a member of an ethnic group is a serious criminal, and they ask for your cooperation.

The following is what happens when you cooperate.

You allow them to send you a tenant. This tenant will usually be an extreme noise pest, very anti-social and may steal from the other tenants. Some tenants will be harassed into leaving. There might be so much noise that the neighbouring houses sell up. Then more tenants will be sent to replace your good tenants who moved out.

You will get people who engage in weird behaviour and who appear threatening. Some female tenants will appear to be prostitutes. Some of these tenants will be engaged in Welfare scams. There may be a portable baby who comes and goes. These tenants will continually change every few months so you won’t know who is in the house. Drugs may be posted to the premises. There will be vandalism of the property, fires in or around the premises; flats destroyed by flooding by over-run baths or showers; doors broken down, communal doors and security gates and their locks continually broken.

The end result of a house being taken over by gang stalkers is that the house will be renovated, up-graded, and command luxury rents – but by that time you will no longer be the owner.

I really don’t know how to advise how you can protect yourself from this. Perhaps if there was some way you could independently verify that the original tenant – the one slandered as a criminal – is not, then that could prove before you get hooked that you are dealing with con artists. But what you can do then to protect yourself, I have no idea.